Steve Jobs once said of Bill Gates that he is ‘basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology.’ I disagree with Jobs; I think Bill Gates is equally unimaginative in philanthropy too, and it’s on this topic that I take issue with his current model and rhetoric insofar as it relates to Africa.
Having lived and worked in South Africa and Nigeria, I struggle to reconcile the picture that Gates paints of Africa with the realities on the ground. Specifically, in his 2014 Gates Foundation Annual Letter he lays out three myths about poverty which he aims to disprove. Myth’s One and Three are fairly innocuous but Myth Two is where he falls seriously short. What he tries to dispute is the notion that “Foreign aid is a big waste.”
If one takes a very narrow view of aid to simply provide basic services to the world’s poor then he is correct – foreign aid has not been a waste but rather tremendously helpful in alleviating suffering and saving lives; a better term would simply be charity. However if the goal, in Gates’s words, is to “lay the groundwork for lasting, long-term economic progress” then aid has been an unmitigated disaster. Apart from a few countries, such as Rwanda and Botswana, the trillion dollars of aid lavished on the continent have done very little to foster accountability and eradicate corruption. In fact, it has had the opposite effect. This is the thesis of the Zambian-born, Harvard and Oxford educated economist, Dambisa Moyo who asserts that aid is akin to the resource curse: it encourages corruption and conflict while at the same time discourages free enterprise. After all, a country that finances itself with bonds is accountable to the capital markets; a country which raises taxes is accountable to its citizens. But a government which gets aid from other governments and large donors is accountable to no one and decades of easy money have debauched the political culture of a continent.
Gates’s response to the corruption problem is very weak indeed and factually incorrect. He states “one common complaint about aid is that some of it gets wasted on corruption…but the horror stories you hear – where aid just helps a dictator build new palaces – mostly comes from a time when aid was designed to win Cold War allies.” This statement was particularly laughable given the recent exposé by South Africa’s corruption watchdog that the president has just spent over $25M on renovating his private rural “palace”, Nkandla with public funds (he justified the elaborate swimming pool as a fire-fighting precaution). This is by a president who has already been tried for corruption and raping an HIV-positive minor.
Bill Gates goes on to say that the current levels of corruption is “small scale.” Well, Lamido Sanusi, the head of the Nigerian Central Bank has recently uncovered ongoing corruption in unaccounted for oil revenues which have thus far totaled over $20B and continues at a rate of over a $1B per month. Bill Gates is rich, but even by his standards this is not small scale…
South Africa Today – Africa News
